Drift vs Intercom (2026): pricing, AI and who each is for

Pick Drift if you sell to other businesses, your website's job is to turn visitors into booked sales meetings, and a five-figure annual contract is normal for your marketing stack. Pick Intercom if you run a support team that needs a help centre, product tours, email campaigns and an AI agent in one system, and you can budget per seat plus per resolution. If your website is an online store and the questions are about products, shipping, returns and orders, neither is the natural fit; the last section covers that case.

Prices below are the published figures as of September 2026. Both vendors change them; check their pricing pages before signing.

The headline numbers are not comparable one to one. Drift's figure covers the whole contract; Intercom's grows with every agent you add and every conversation Fin closes. Work out a year of both for your team before comparing.

Intercom's cost is arithmetic; Drift's is a negotiation. Using the published Intercom prices and the reported Drift entry figure:

Below roughly ten seats Intercom is the cheaper of the two on published prices, and it lets you start monthly. Drift only makes financial sense when booked meetings are worth thousands each; that is who it is designed for.

Drift is conversational marketing for B2B: the chat exists to qualify a visitor, book a meeting with the right rep and hand the lead to the sales team and CRM. Since 2024 it has been part of Salesloft, a sales engagement platform, which tells you where the roadmap points. Support tickets, order questions and a help centre are not the job.

Intercom is a customer service platform. The chat is one door into a helpdesk that also includes a help centre, product tours, outbound email and, since 2023, the Fin AI agent that answers from your help content and is billed per resolution. It is built for software companies with a support team of agents, hence the per-seat model.

If your visitors are shoppers, notice what is missing from both descriptions: a product catalogue, live order status, coupons and the store platform plugins that make those work.

Intercom's Fin answers support questions from your help centre and the content you connect, and every conversation it resolves without a person costs $0.99. That is a clean, honest model for a support team, and it also means a busy month is an expensive month. Drift's AI is aimed at qualification and meeting booking rather than resolving support questions, and it is priced inside the contract rather than per conversation.

For a store, the question is narrower: can the AI read your products, stock, policies and orders and answer from them? Both platforms can be connected to store data with integration work; neither ships with a WooCommerce or OpenCart plugin that syncs the catalogue and looks up orders out of the box.

• Choose Drift when marketing owns the website, the goal is booked sales meetings, deals are large and an annual contract is expected.
• Choose Intercom when a support team needs helpdesk, help centre, tours and email in one place, and per-seat plus per-resolution billing is acceptable at your volume.
• Choose neither when the site is an online store and the questions are about products, shipping, returns and "where is my order". A store widget that reads your catalogue answers those better and costs a fraction; see below.
• Whatever you choose, price a full year including seats, AI usage and onboarding, and ask what happens at the cap.

Vatdi is a website chat widget for stores. The AI answers from your own catalogue, pages, policies and uploads, looks up order status through native plugins for WooCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Magento, Shopware, Joomla and Drupal, offers coupons, captures leads and hands over to your team with the conversation attached. Pricing is per store, not per seat: Free ($0, 15 conversations a month, every feature), Starter ($4.49 a month, 150 conversations) and Grow ($7.49 a month, unlimited conversations). Unlimited teammates on every plan.

What it does not do, so you can rule it out quickly: no meeting booking or CRM routing (Drift's job), no ticketing helpdesk, help centre or email campaigns (Intercom's job), no WhatsApp or Messenger channels, and no live order lookup on Shopify yet. If you need any of those, the two platforms above are the serious options. If you need shoppers answered on your own site, start with the free plan and compare Vatdi vs Intercom or Vatdi vs Drift in detail.